AMERICAN ANTI-INTELLECTURALISM
(or, in a more positive lights, Pierce's and Willaim James' philosophical pragmatism.)
The importance of rationalism - or the lack thereof - has been a Western cultural battle since the Counter-Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries.
I've studied New Thought for the last 30 years (though I didn't know it by that name) and, in the Age of Trump, have come up to speed on the Counter-Enlightenment, the actual HISTORY of New Thought, esotericism, traditionalism, the occult, chaos magick, and quantum mysticism (which sounds redundant, but I was a psych major so it's ALL mysticism to me 
)
)Needless to say, since becoming an intentional Christian in 1972, I've always indulged what I would call the trans-rational (going beyond rationality, NOT overthrowing it)
Enlightenment thinking has emptied the culture of the language of mystery, paradox, poetics, emotion, along with the sense of individual and cultural significance, value, purpose.
THAT. As well as the cultural and economic threat to the working and middle classes, has left us vulnerable to demagogues and magicians of various stripes: including Christian Seven Mountain Dominionism and the Prosperity Gospel.
"In The Campus War (1971), the philosopher John Searle said,
"[T]he two most salient traits of the radical movement are its anti-intellectualism and its hostility to the university as an institution. ... Intellectuals, by definition, are people who take ideas seriously for their own sake. Whether or not a theory is true or false is important to them, independently of any practical applications it may have. [Intellectuals] have, as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, an attitude to ideas that is at once playful and pious. But, in the radical movement, the intellectual ideal of knowledge for its own sake is rejected. Knowledge is seen as valuable only as a basis for action, and it is not even very valuable there. Far more important than what one knows is how one feels.[8]"
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